Staithes Group

Staithes, located on the north-east coast of England was a natural draw for artists in the 1880's. Gilbert Foster, who along with Fred Jackson and Mark Senior had been working in the area from around 1880. For the next thirty years, the Yorkshire Coastline became the focal point for over thirty artists who were to come together as the Staithes Group. Unlike Newlyn, it was never an artist’s colony and there was no central figure like Stanhope Forbes who was initially cohesive in Newlyn. Instead, Staithes was more a collective of like-minded artists who were simply eager to portray urban life and to escape the artistic rigidity in the then establishment. The coming of the railways enticed more artists to travel and travel they did from far and wide. The early protagonists included Spence Ingall, Ernest Dade, Hannah Hoyland later to meet and marry her future husband Fred Mayor, Isa and Robert Jobling, Arthur Friedenson, Rowland Hill and Henry Silkstone.

Arguably the most eminent of visitors were Harold Knight and his future wife Laura Johnson where they were to spend the next decade before travelling south to Newlyn. Previous to 1901 artists associated with the Staithes Group had exhibited with the Yorkshire Union of Artists which has started in 1887 by Ernest Rigg and Rowland Hill. However in 1901 the Staithes Group separated from the YUA and held an independent exhibition at the Fishermen’s Institute in Staithes. The success of the show prompted the formation of a committee and a second show the following year. By 1904, the exhibition was housed at the Anderson Gallery in Whitby but by 1907 the Staithes Art Club, as it was now known, had disbanded. Future shows were then re-absorbed into the YUA as had previously happened. Ironically it could be argued that their own success killed them off to a degree. There was no local venue big enough to house the growing number of exhibitors and there was only a finite number of wealthy patrons in the north-east.